Field Gulls, SB Nation’s Seattle Seahawks blog, has arguably the best writers in the entire SB Nation family, and Simmons raided them to get Danny Kelly to be part of his NFL team. Major loss for Field Gulls; hopefully Simmons doesn’t go after Kenneth Arthur, too.
With that said, I really do enjoy the Ringer’s After the Thrones on HBO. It’s essentially the Grantland TV critics, along with Jason Concepcion (of “Ask the Maester” fame), but it’s still really good commentary. Makes you wish they had been doing this the entire run of the series.
I watched the first four episodes of After the Thrones, and I couldn’t stay with it. The podcasts for the last few seasons had the same amount of jokes but a lot more criticism, much of it richly deserved. On the After show, Greenwald’s not going to say an episode was filler or that a plot reveal was handled badly, more’s the pity. We need more Andy Greenwalds, fewer Chris Hardwicks.
I’m not a fan of the Ringer NBA podcast thus far. A lot of folks bantering about intra-office shenanigans, and rarely any actual thoughtful hoop insight.
They’re pretty short on analysts for all sports right now, especially since the big four of Lowe, Barnwell, Keri and Lindbergh didn’t make the jump. For the NBA specifically, Travon Free apparently played some college ball and might be a good analyst, but that remains to be seen. Chris Ryan is an editor and pop culture guy. Juliet Litman is an editor and reality TV person. Tate Frazier produces the podcasts, and basically should never be seen or heard.
It’s hard to imagine a worse NBA podcast*. Perhaps they’re grooming Frazier to be the next Kirk Goldsberry, but the NBA podcast is amazingly devoid of both stats and old-school eye-test banter.
*Well, not exactly true…imagine The Starters, if everyone was digitally erased except for J.E. Skeets.
Just watched the first episode of Bill’s new show and it was shockingly enjoyable. Barkley and Affleck were great guests and Bill has gotten so much better on camera. I’ll be sure to check back in to see more.
I liked it a lot, too, but, man, tell us how you really feel about deflategate, Ben Affleck. Wowsers. That was like old-white-people-screaming-Benghazi.
I thought the show was mediocre. Simmons is a great writer and an amazing creative talent, but TV is not his forte. The Barkley segment was ok. The Affleck segment was a shit show. Affleck seemed drunk and it was just a Patriots circle jerk.
So is Simmons no longer going to write his columns? I really have no desire to watch the guy. There’s already way too many talking heads spouting off about sports. I enjoy reading a good column, though.
Even the weekly football column at Grantland was typically 60-75% pop culture/ inside jokes/ bitching about how Boston got hosed in some sport/ crowing about Boston being great. The rest was actually relevant to the sports topic at hand.
He recently wrote something about Kevin Durant’s impending free agency at The Ringer. It looks like he’s going to occasionally post columns there, but it’s certainly not going to be frequent. According to The Hollywood Reporter, HBO is paying him $7-9 million a year for the TV show, so it’s going to get his full effort I would imagine.
